One of the many goals that I have as an elementary educator is to provide students with the tools necessary to be responsible, successful adults. By successful, I mean happy adults. I do not think that the salary that you earn is any indication of success.
Passive acceptance of the Teacher’s wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; It is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes a man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position. Bertrand Russell
I plan to create a classroom where students feel safe, confident, and proud. It should be a stable, structured atmosphere where routines are a part of the learning process. Unfortunately, many children do not have structure and routines at home and some, sadly, do not even feel safe in their own homes. “Each child’s social experiences and expectations are different; their concepts of intelligence and how they have experienced learning…are different; and their background and cultural values are likely different as well” (Murray & Jorgensen, 2007, p. 49). I hope to develop an understanding of my students by gathering information from parents or caregivers, resource teachers of special needs students, information from past teachers, and information from the students about their interests. This will provide me with the tools necessary to create lessons and resources that engage students while encouraging independence, introduce different levels of complexity while still being accessible to...
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...ebert, J., Carpenter, T. P., Fennema, E., Fuson, K. C., Wearne, D., Murray, H., et al. (1997). Making Sense: Teaching and Learning Mathematics with Understanding. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Lourens, B. (2004, March). CYC-ONLINE: Places of Emotional Safety: Creating Classrooms. Retrieved June13, 2010 from The International Child & Youth Care Network: http://www.cyc-net.org
McDevitt, T. M., & Ormrod, J. E. (2010). Child development and education (4th Edition ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, inc.
Murray, M., & Jorgensen, J. (2007). The Differentiated Math Classroom A Guide for Teachers, K-8. Chicago: Heinemann.
Noddings, N. (2007). Philosophy of education (2nd Edition ed.). Boulder: Westview Press.
Piggott, J. (2008, September). Nrich.maths.org: Mathematics Enrichment: Rich Tasks and Contexts. Retrieved June 16, 2010, from http://nrich.maths.org/5662.
Van de Walle, J., , F., Karp, K. S., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2010). Elementary and middle school mathematics, teaching developmentally. (Seventh ed.). New York, NY: Allyn & Bacon.
McDevitt, T. M., & Ormrod, J. E. (2010). Child development and education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Mill argues in Chapter 2 of On Liberty that we need not suppress opinions, even if they are false, because they promote truth. Mill argues that the people or government should never use coercion in suppressing opinion because an opinion is a “personal possession of no value except to the owner.” This means that opinions only mean something to the one that is expressing the opinion. Unless the opinion is directed to harming others, there is no reason for it to be suppressed. But Mill thinks that the most important reason why suppressing opinions is wrong “is that it is robbing the human race.” Mill means that the suppression of an opinion hurts the human race because there is a possibility that the opinion could be true. If it is true and is suppressed, we are stuck with a false opinion. Suppressing an opinion because
My Educational philosophy is defined in becoming a teacher as a set of ideas and beliefs about education that guide the professional behavior of educators. Also included in educational philosophy are one’s beliefs about teaching and learning, students, knowledge and what is worth knowing. My five general purposes for philosophy of education are: to set goals of plan, to teach useful and relevant information, be aware of students learning styles, modeling positive cooperative behavior, to look for solutions and to make sure those solutions are working.
National Center for Children in Poverty. Early childhood education. n.d. - n.d. - n.d. Retrieved 08 2010, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Early_childhood_education&oldid=377988928. Erikson’s Stages of Development. a.
Craig, G. J., & Dunn, W. L. (Ex.: 2010). Understanding human development (2nd Ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.
In today’s educational environment, all students expect to receive the same level of instruction from schools and all students must meet the same set of standards. Expectations for students with learning disabilities are the same as students without any learning difficulties. It is now unacceptable for schools or teachers to expect less from one segment of students because they have physical disabilities, learning disabilities, discipline problems, or come from poor backgrounds. Standardize testing has resulted in making every student count as much as their peers and the most positive impact has been seen with the lowest ability students. Schools have developed new approaches to reach these previously underserved students while maintaining passing scores for the whole student body. To ensure academic success, teachers employ a multi-strategy approach to develop students of differing abilities and backgrounds. Every student is different in what skills and experiences they bring to the classroom; their personality, background, and interests are as varied as the ways in which teachers can choose to instruct them. Differentiated instruction has been an effective method in which teachers can engage students of various backgrounds and achieve whole-class success. When using differentiated instruction, teachers develop lesson strategies for each student or groups of students that provide different avenues of learning but all avenues arrive at the same learning goal.
Skemp, R (2002). Mathematics in the Primary School. 2nd ed. London: Taylor and Francis .
Expressing one’s opinion allowed others to either discover that what they believed to be true was actually false, or that it would help solidify one’s opinion to be true. Mill argued that the more we know, the better off we are as a society. Over time, good ideas will become successful, and bad ideas will fail. This sounds like a pretty good idea at first, but then on second thought, should speech be regulated? What happens when freedom of speech harm’s others? This comes as a result of the society of today, the world we live in, where speech is free and opinions uncontrolled. It must be said that free speech is a human right, however it comes at a price, and that price is
Kirova, A., & Bhargava, A. (2002). Learning to guide preschool children's mathematical understanding: A teacher's professional growth. 4 (1), Retrieved from http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v4n1/kirova.html
Silver, E. A. (1998). Improving Mathematics in Middle School: Lessons from TIMSS and Related Research, US Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328.
Towers, J., Martin, L., & Pirie, S. (2000). Growing mathematical understanding: Layered observations. In M.L. Fernandez (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Tucson, AZ, 225-230.
A somewhat underused strategy for teaching mathematics is that of guided discovery. With this strategy, the student arrives at an understanding of a new mathematical concept on his or her own. An activity is given in which "students sequentially uncover layers of mathematical information one step at a time and learn new mathematics" (Gerver & Sgroi, 2003). This way, instead of simply being told the procedure for solving a problem, the student can develop the steps mainly on his own with only a little guidance from the teacher.
“A good teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary” (Thomas Carruthers). Before we can consider ourselves professional teachers or even an expert teacher, we must first understand the way in which our students learn, how they are motivated to learn and what kind of environment would support their best learning. These questions have long been pondered by psychologists and teachers alike. As a pre-service teachers, I believe it is important for us to also begin considering these questions and take them into account for our future teaching practices. Moreover, in order for meaningful learning to occur and remain relevant for our students, we need to create a safe and inclusive learning environment. I believe this environment of safe and inclusive education is created through three key areas. These areas consist of the different facets of a child’s motivation and the idea of scaffolding particularly in regards to information processing.
It is not only in my own writing that my awareness of math has been heightened. While reading articles for classes, on news websites, or blogs, I find myself paying more attention to the flow of the author’s argument. We’ve learned that in proof writing it is important to be clear, concise, and rigorous and the same applies to an argument within a paper. I’ve come to realize that if an author is trying to convince me of their point, then they also need to show me why their point is true or important. In this way, I’ve become more critical of an author’s argument; rather than just believing everything that they write, I more closely evaluate the progression o...